JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 10, 1978 9:25 PM

I'm skipping a few brief journal entries, April 7 - 9, about buying a cassette deck at Radio Shack, going to a disco, reading Elizabeth Goudge's The Child from the Sea very slowly, and not writing or drawing. The April 10th entry is much more substantive, so a long excerpt follows...

"I received my tax return money today, $198. Unfortunately, I can't spend it. Not since I bought the cassette deck. I'm going to put it in the bank Friday with the check from work.

"Didn't do a damn thing today. R-- [a co-worker at the Avalanche Journal Newspaper] came over about 7:30 PM....He brought over a short story he had written a year or two back that I had read when he had written it. The story is bad in my opinion. He thinks it is good, but everyone thinks their first story is good. It's about some guy (6'3", 160 lbs., brown eyes and hair, etc.) in his apartment, drinking a beer. The doorbell rings. A wet, ratty looking girl is at the door. She is a girl he dated years ago, but got married after their affair ended. They have had no connections for the last two years. She wants him back. He takes her back....Their future is in the air....And at the end he implyed their future was favorable. Typical fantasy story. He read my 'A Parade.' I can see where quite a few mistakes in the story are, after discussing it with him, although I wouldn't admit it, and actually, he didn't pick out the mistakes. He just made me look a little closer at the story, although he probably wasn't aware of it. I'm going to have to rewrite the damn thing now.

"Still reading, The Child from the Sea. On page 62. Only 576 pages to go."

MANHOOD REDO: It's hard not to read this excerpt in light of the previous blog entry, only I'm not angry here, I'm snarky and dismissive. If traditional masculinity is partly dependent on proving you are better than other men, women, etc., then it seems to me that I'm proving to myself that my writing is better than R--'s. There's another instance I can think of, public rather than private, when I displayed the same sort of attitude toward someone else's writing. In grad school, a creative writing class I had signed up for was open to the community. A woman in her 60s had enrolled; it was her first creative writing course, while most if not all of the grad students had taken similar courses as undergrads. She had a backlog of material and kept submitting story after story and poem after poem, until all of the rest of the class grew tired of reading her writing and making similar suggestions again and again. During one class I had come up with a Freudian interpretation of one of her short stories - there was a scene involving bombs falling into a harbor, etc. - that I knew would bother her. When I shared it in class, it was clear to her and everyone else that I was ridiculing her story. She started crying but told everyone it was allergies. Later she wrote a poem about a buffalo herd, the young buffalo leading the way and the older buffalo being left behind.

Not one of my prouder moments. If I had it to do over again, I'd be more supportive and generous with R-- and would do the same with the woman in the creative writing class, but also go the professor to see if he might ask her to slow down her submissions, maybe rewrite something the class had already given her feedback about.

It's hard to support others when your masculine status and self-worth continually and so easily feel threatened. Instead, you act in ugly ways to prove your superiority, in my case with language. In the end, it's not even a particularly good way to support yourself.